A lady at work sent this out to the office, I find it funny and too long for Twitter, so I’m sharing it here.
“I’ve just heard from a friend in North Dakota . He says it has been snowing heavily for three days now. His wife has done nothing but stare through the window. If it doesn’t stop soon he’ll probably have to let her in.”
So Gawker Media had a lovely issue with their databases getting exposed and all of their user information, including private information for staff members of the various blogs and company as a whole. This seems amusing in a horrible way after Brian Crecente of Kotaku started showing off the New York office of Gawker Media and Kotaku not even a few weeks ago. Oi. >.<
Due to this srs fffffff-up, all of my accounts that use the email associated with my Gawker Media account, that I only used for Kotaku, have been getting hit on all fronts. Had I lost control of my LinkedIn, World of Warcraft, or Gmail account due to this exposure, this would have been not only horrible because I was using the same password across multiple accounts but that they got hit in the first place. It’s a tad embarrassing for Gawker as a whole and really reduces the faith in what they do as a whole, even if they fix the issue so it is even less likely to occur again. Nonetheless, when I am given the chance to delete my account, I likely will. And it seems I’ll have to go about finding the different places that use said email and password I had on Gawker Media. Hell, maybe it’s time to get a second email account going for sh*t like this…
Email I received from Gawker at 8pm Monday night follows below:
Decided to bring back the snow this year, but with a new look and a time-out. Snow script found via http://www.altan.hr/snow/.
Also, test of Twitter Tools to see if it tweets. 
Over the course of this semester, I’ve run into situations that make me question my own standards about programming. A lot of this has come down to how to do database operation extraction with the idea of having a completely separate driver class inside of the project, using a separate application dedicated to these operations and doing something like RPC or using XML to communicate the query results, having each class know how to run its own queries (be they in the class or attached to a package with stored procedures), or just saying screw it and having a ton of raw queries that do all the lifting somewhere. This question has come from a lot of my time spent at work and the database and package clean-up I’ve been doing for quite some time (somebody has to do it) and that I’ve been working on a few different projects that make me curious about the idea. Plus my final project for GUI Programming this semester is using SQLite with Java (SQLite is still rather new to me so it seems like a fun project). So I have a lot of reasons to question my thoughts and concepts for databases and operating with them.
Yet the other questions have either been really rather dull, like should all if statements have a set of encapsulating braces when they are not needed or should they always be there (rather dull, but makes a big difference in readability.. I went with always, for now), and others are neat in a different way. In my GUI class, the professor uses Moodle to manage the class and her habit is to have every link to a document, such as a tutorial that she finds great or even the assignment pages, must open in a new window. Generally, this wouldn’t bother me in the least as I am used to center-clicking links to open them in a new tab and will only occasionally run into a website that futz up my browser. Thank goodness for browser override on that targeting behaviour. But with Moodle, when you set it to always open in a new window, it checks to see if the page is in a new window, and if it isn’t, it gives you a stupid sh*t-eating-grin error message with a link to the page again. Luckily, you can finally get the page open in a new tab instead of a whole new window but it took two page visits and two clicks to get there because the UI didn’t respect your environment settings. This only amuses me because it’s a UI design class where we spend more time on programming iffy assignments in Java and finally JavaScript at the end of the semester. Thankfully the professor didn’t have time for databases.. might have to throw a fit and likely a few chairs. This is probably the only UI design-related question I’ve had all semester for a UI design class. … Oi. But this issue made me question what I think about how hyperlinks are designed for targeting the web page. Well, first.. let’s break down what the targeting is…
So at work I’ve been working on setting up a Windows 7 64-bit OS with all of our VB6 development libraries and such. Been having tons of issues installing some software because of the 32-bit vs 64-bit issue that I never had prior (always ran 32-bit Windows, always) and have done a bit of research. Came across one particular reason why 64-bit Vista/7 have issues with supporting 32-bit apps, user-level emulation of a 32-bit machine.
Now, this is likely not why I am having issues with everything I’ve been setting up. It may be, but my difficulty probably stems from the libraries being designed purely for 32-bit with 32-bit limitations in mind… naughty programmers. Either way, this 32-bit emulation at the user-level is an issue mostly for items that need the have access to the kernel. Things like your drivers that need to be run at kernel-level are dead in the water if they are 32-bit on a 64-bit Vista/7 installation. Sucky.
As you can see above, I have two windows shown for comparison. The top is the Design portion of the editor in The Netbeans while the top is the executed version of the exact same window, from within The Netbeans. Why they look different and have different sizes of elements? No fscking clue! <.<`
What. The. Hell. The. Netbeans?!
I should just go back to using vi for everything again…